Free Republic

CHATTANOOGA — Former state Rep. Chris Newton, serving a one-year federal prison sentence in the Tennessee Waltz investigation of public corruption, has been moved to a community corrections program in Tennessee, U.S. Bureau of Prisons records show. "He is in a halfway house," prisons bureau spokesman Mike Truman said Friday. Newton served nine months of his sentence in a minimum security camp at the U.S. Penitentiary in Atlanta before he was moved Thursday to what the bureau calls community corrections. The city where the halfway house is located wasn’t identified by the federal agency, but officials at Midway Rehabilitation Center...

MEMPHIS — A federal judge on Wednesday sentenced a former state lawmaker who admitted taking bribes during the Tennessee Waltz undercover sting to a year in prison. Former state Rep. Chris Newton also was sentenced by federal Judge Jon McCalla to two years supervised release and 200 hours community service and fined $10,000. "What I did was wrong there's no doubt about that," Newton told McCalla. Newton was one of five sitting or former lawmakers arrested in the Tennessee Waltz probe of public corruption and was the first defendant to be sentenced. Two "bag men" and two local government officials...